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Thursday, December 20, 2012

I’m going to start with a
warning that if you’re looking for a spooky novel, American Ghost, by Janis Owens, is not it. Many people on other sites have posted that
they were under the assumption that this was a ghost story. However, the type of ghost Owens writes about
is not traditional but historical.

American Ghost
takes place in the American South, but I wasn’t entirely sure in what time
period until after the first few chapters.
Sam Lense is a college student who has come to Hendrix, Florida under
false pretenses. He tells the people he
meets that he is researching Native American tribes of the area when really he
is investigating an ancestor’s murder at the hands of Henry Kite. Kite was executed for his crime long ago, along with
most of his family, in such a heinous way, that the modern-day people of
Hendrix do not wish to speak of it. Sam
meets Jolie Hoyt, who comes from a family that is very well-known for all the
wrong reasons. Did the Hoyt family have
something to do with this lynching? Sam
soon realizes that digging into the secrets of Hendrix could be extremely
dangerous.

Some readers have compared
this book to The Help, but in my
eyes, there is no comparison. To me, the present-day characters in American Ghost were not
fully fleshed out enough to the point where I cared enough to continue reading
about them. However, the historical
aspect of the novel makes it worth reading and remembering that it wasn’t so
long ago that this actually happened in America.